Doll Closetwill
be the next in Amber Hawk Swanson’s series of durational building
performances, and will invite conversations about the closet as a space
of both queer secrecy and doll ownership. The performance is made
possible by Hawk Swanson’s friend and collaborator “Jesse,” an anonymous
doll owner she met through their shared involvement in the doll
community. The performance is inspired by the hidden room Jesse built in
his home where he secretly kept his 1998 model RealDoll, Heather, for
fifteen years before donating her body to be transformed and reassembled
in Hawk Swanson’s 2013 performance Sidore (Mark II) / Heather > LOLITA. Over the seven consecutive days of Doll Closet,
Hawk Swanson will build a replica of Heather’s room. Jesse will call in
during select hours of each day to provide guidance and instruction.
The pieces of Heather leftover from LOLITA will also be present to witness the reconstruction.

In Doll Closet,
Amber Hawk Swanson transforms the process of building and the resulting
replica as a platform for members of the doll community—and Jesse
specifically—to respond to mainstream misrepresentation of doll
ownership. The performance highlights alternative narratives of owners
who use their relationships to dolls as a way to explore their own
gender, obtain uncomplicated companionship, and connect with a community
in the face of social anxiety and loneliness. Doll Closet
not only provides a necessary vehicle for members of the doll community
to speak for themselves without risking their anonymity, but also asks
what kinds of intimacies, relations, and unanticipated connections can
flourish in secrecy. It explores how the interior space of the closet
can be rendered as both capacious and collective.

Hawk
Swanson has been a part of the doll community since 2005 after
acknowledging her failed attempts to date “organic” women and developing
an affinity with “doll husbands” who consider dolls to be life
partners. In 2006, she commissioned the fabrication of Amber Doll, a RealDoll made in the artist’s likeness who became her artistic and romantic companion
for five years. Hawk Swanson’s projects with dolls are part of an
ongoing exploration of their material capacities for synthesis and
salvation—that is, the personal and political promise of the copy.

Doll Closet will take place three years to date from Amber Doll > TILIKUM (2011) and one year to date from LOLITA—the
first two in an alchemic performance series transforming lifelike
silicone sex dolls into models of captive whales. Over the ten days of TILIKUM,
Hawk Swanson transmogrified Amber Doll’s body into a replica of
Tilikum, a bull orca living in captivity at SeaWorld Orlando who had
been involved in three human deaths. In LOLITA,
Hawk Swanson dismantled two other dolls, Heather and Sidore (Mark II),
who were donated by their longtime partners and owners Jesse and
Davecat. During the 70-hour broadcasted performance, Hawk Swanson used
their silicone flesh and PVC skeletons to construct a replica of Lolita,
the oldest living killer whale in captivity, while members of the doll
and marine mammal activist communities participated via call-ins. In his
calls, Jesse described the room in which he hid and surveilled
Heather.

Doll Closet takes up the narrative Jesse introduced to LOLITA.
During the construction process, Jesse will phone in to explain how,
after noticing seven feet of empty space behind a wall through a hole
left by the previous residents of his 1940’s colonial-style home, he
fashioned a secret room secured by a locking pin system inspired by bank
vaults and a surveillance camera—which both protected the closet and
kept watch over Heather. Hawk Swanson will simultaneously receive phone
and Skype calls from other members of the doll community, as well as
manage a special page on the doll forum Our Doll Community
where owners will share images of their dolls’ spaces. The act of
building a “private” room in the open will thus generate a public yet
interior space, where conversations can air what had previously been
confined to secrecy. Through the durational process of replicating
Heather’s original closet, Hawk Swanson expands her ongoing exploration
of how replicas become unique objects and function as vehicles for
discourse.

Amber Hawk Swanson
(b. 1980, Davenport, Iowa) is a video and performance artist living and
working in New York City. Hawk Swanson has exhibited internationally,
including at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France); Denny Gallery (New York,
NY); and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). Her recent residencies include
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace (New York, NY); Skowhegan
School of Painting & Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME); MacDowell
(Peterborough, NH); and Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY). Her work is
included in the permanent and MPP collections of the Museum of
Contemporary Photography in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006).

This
work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported
by Jerome Foundation and by public funds from the New York State
Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural
Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

Amber Hawk Swanson (b. 1980) is a New York-based artist born in Davenport, Iowa. Her work deals with how the psychological debt of love animates us in a social-emotional economy.
Recent exhibitions and screenings include Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France); Denny Gallery (New York, NY); Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY); and Locust Projects (solo, Miami, FL). Hawk Swanson is currently at work on a November 2017 solo exhibition & performative lecture in Belfast, UK
Hawk Swanson’s seminars and residencies include the New Museum Seminar, (Temporary) Collections of Ideas: Speculation (New York, NY); a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) Workspace Residency (New York, NY); an LMCC Process Space Residency (New York, NY); as well as residencies at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY); MacDowell (Peterborough, NH); Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (Skowhegan, ME); the Sharpe-Walentas Space Program (Brooklyn, NY); Atlantic Center for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL); Mana Contemporary BSMT Residency (Jersey City, NJ); and G-CADD (Granite City, IL) in partnership with Paul Artspace (Florissant, MO). In Summer 2018, Hawk Swanson will be a Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Artist in Residence.
Recent scholarly writing on her work has been published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies (2015 & 2012) and Theatre Drama Review (TDR, 2012). Hawk Swanson's work has additionally been profiled and reviewed in the Guardian (2014), Chicago Tribune (2011), and Associated Press (2007).
Recent visiting artist lecture appointments include Columbia University; New York University's Tisch School of Arts; Eugene Lang College; The New School; Hunter College, Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT); and Center for the Humanities, The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center (all New York, NY). She has additionally lectured at Yale University (New Haven, CT); McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada); Maine College of Art (MECA, Portland, ME); Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA, Baltimore, MD); Pratt Institute (Brooklyn, NY); and East Carolina University (Greenville, NC). In October 2017 she will speak about "DOLLY" as part of the "Hold It Better, Release It Carefully: Object Lessons on Water and Belonging" panel at the International Sculpture Conference (Kansas City, MO).
Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, IL).
Hawk Swanson holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Studio Arts, 2006) and is a recipient of a 2015 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement Grant and a 2014 Franklin Furnace Fund Grant. She currently teaches in the Sculpture Departments of Rhode Island School of Design, RISD (Providence, RI) and Virginia Commonwealth University, VCU (Richmond, VA).
Portrait by Christa Holka.